In Internet freedom fight, why the ITU matters (for now)

For most of its almost-150-year history, the meetings of the
International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the United Nations'
communications standards body, have been rather predictable affairs.

Representatives of the world's governments regularly gather to sign off on technical recommendations drafted by the technocrats of telephone companies and government bureaucrats. The diplomats would then return home to encode the minutiae of the regulations into their governments' communications policies. Less frequently the same officials met to renegotiate the terms and scope of the ITU's work, to take into account new telecommunications innovation (like radio or television) that may have come into view. It's a meticulous and slow-moving body of international technical co-operation which for over a century has ensured that radio stations don't interfere with each other, communication satellites pass safely in the night, and that telephone lines in one country can seamlessly connect to those in another.

The work behind such standards and definitions, however, has
a far wider effect than just fine-tuning our communication devices.
Telecommunications standards shape the media they describe, and can influence
how free those media are. As long as the majority of media passes through
cables and between aerials, the outcome of these technical arguments will have
a serious knock-on effect on press freedom.

This week's ITU meeting in Dubai was intended to be another
uncontroversial renegotiation of its organizing principles, the International Telecommunication Regulationsor ITRs. Instead, deep divides emerged, with the United States and at
least a dozen other countries (out of 193 member states) exercising their strongest
sanction by refusing to sign the ITU's final document.

The Internet has a long history of ruffling feathers at the
ITU. Here's a journalist's report from an
earlier spat, back in 1976:

There is a heated international
argument over who will control packet-switched communication networks--the
carriers or the users... Many multi-terminal users believe they can maximize
the benefit of packet service only by employing end-to-end communication
protocols... This contention makes the carriers livid and helps explain why the
argument was gathering heat at the Geneva [ITU] meetings.

That was a description by Phil Hirsch of Datamation of the first conflict between
the young advocates for what became the Internet, and the ITU's own standard
designers.

The fight then reflects the fight now. The ITU is run by
governments, who at that time mostly directly controlled their countries'
telephone networks through state-owned telephone companies ("the carriers").
Back in 1976, the ITU's in-house design for the future was a protocol called
X.25. It assumed the future of the new digital network would be similarly, centrally
controlled by the same state-run telephone companies.

The United States' ARPANET TCP/IP protocol, designed by Vint Cerf's team
of academics and sponsored by the U.S.military, was the competition. It was an "end-to-end communication
protocol," which meant the power and responsibility for almost every aspect of
how data was sent and received shifted to end-users instead.

The ITU lost that battle. The users, it seemed, wanted more
control. TCP/IP dominates our packet-switched Internet, not the ITU's X.25
protocol.

As a consequence, the descendants of those "carriers" ended
up losing a great deal of power over what passes over their digital networks.
Indeed, everyone lost the ability to control the flow of information online.
Countries like China have policies explicitly in place to limit and filter
Internet news, but they are often stymied by Internet users' ability to adopt
new software and web platforms, and the network's resistance to central
mandates. All of that slipperiness, so useful to fight censorship and propagate
the news, comes from the network's decentralized design and TCP/IP's triumph
over more centralized protocols like X.25.

The incentives and biases that made X.25 the ITU's favorite
protocol are still present today. The ITU remains the exclusive domain of
governments, advised by large incumbent telecommunications companies. Its
deliberations have traditionally taken place behind
closed doors , with a limited set of participants invited by governments.
At best, its delegates prefer carefully documented, precisely controlled, and
universally proven approaches. At worst, its technical decisions are
disproportionately influenced by the authoritarian bent of some participating
nations, including countries unfriendly to press freedom such as Saudi Arabia,
China, and the United Arab Emirates.

What standards govern the wider Internet, by contrast, have
always been more free-wheeling. The process in its own informal standards
bodies is sometimes chaotic, and often bypassed entirely. There's no Internet
standard or oversight board for Skype, for instance. BitTorrent, one of the
most popular protocols online due to its use in sharing large (often
copyright-infringing) files, has never been near a standards body.

But no one compels anyone to use Skype or BitTorrent, nor
the more official standards of the Internet and the Web. And no international
organization exists that might suggest that users should not be allowed to use
those protocols. The users' choices take precedence.

The fear among Internetfreedom advocateswas that by having the ITU assume some of
theroles of defining the protocols of
the Internet, arguments for more directgovernment control would trump those offering more flexibility or
freedoms.

The past 12 days in Dubai showed that to be the case.
Telephone companies lobbied to up-end
the pricing system of the Net. A proposal to encode
human rights obligations into the organization's charter failed after
objections from China, Algeria, and Iran. Finally, a
late-night act of procedural sleight-of-hand led to clauses about the
Internet being pasted into the proposed treaty. By the final day, several
countries, including the U.S., the United Kingdom, Australia, Kenya, and India,
declined to sign the end result.

If the leadership of the ITU was serious about taking more
control over Internet affairs, its plan failed. In the wake of the ITU's split
vote, the Internet remains as loosely coordinated and user-driven by default as
it has always been.

That's not a universally positive result for online press
freedom. While all the countriesdeclining to sign the ITU treaty cited control of the Internet as the
reason,academic Milton Mueller has suggested
that another proposal , requiring countries to provide "non-discriminatory
access to moderntelecommunications,"
might have inspired the United States' ire.
The resolution, a sore point for years, was prompted by the
effects of the U.S. sanctions on Internet availability in the Sudan. Other
proposals in the ITU document, including on transparency and notification about
the use of Internet "kill
switches", would have promoted connectivity in the face of government
suppression, not limited it.

And Internet regulation is not all sweetness and light
without the ITU. Many countries suspected the U.S. of wanting to maintain
control of the domain name system through its support for ICANN, the American
private company that manages the more central elements of the domain name
infrastructure. The ITU may be secretive, but by comparison ICANN is positively opaque, and continues to lack
the international involvement that the ITU can genuinely boast. As Ethan
Zuckerman notes, the Internet is not perfect as it is, and lacks obvious
ways to change for the better.

But perhaps the most worrying potential future for the Internet
will happen whether the ITU is able torecover from this diplomatic collapse or not.

For 35 years, Internet advocates' concerns with the ITU have
been with its dominant voices:governments and their closely associated incumbent telecom
companies.In the next decade, a large
part of end-user Internet traffic will
be shifting to mobile broadband devices.Mobile networks are largely run by those same incumbent telcos. Their
networks are heavily regulated and controlled by local governments. Mobile
companies are free to block protocols like Skype, censor websites, and spy on
their users, with little oversight or global condemnation. It would be a
tragedy if the pioneers of the Internet fought off the slow-moving bureaucratic
threat of the ITU, only to lose control of their ideals to those same forces in
the fast-moving and unregulated wilds of the mobile Internet. Their victory at
the ITU would be pyrrhic; and the real losers would be journalists and their
audiences, reading news on a mobile but spied-upon and censored Internet.

San Francisco-based CPJ Internet Advocacy Coordinator Danny O’Brien has worked globally as a journalist and activist covering technology and digital rights. Follow him on Twitter @danny_at_cpj.

Comments

Hi Danny - very interesting piece. But major correction needed: it was not China, Iran and Algeria who scuppered the freedom of expression text - they supported it. It was the US and the European Union who blocked it -check out the transcripts or webcasts at: http://www.itu.int/en/wcit-12/Pages/newsroom.aspx

Danny and Sarah. The human rights/freedom of expression reference remains in the Preamble - obligating Member States to respect the obligations of the human rights treaties to which they are signatories. All have signed on to the UN Universal Declaration for Human Rights. Article 19 of which guarantees the freedom to hold and express opinions across ALL frontiers and ALL borders. This is a significant victory for all parties concerned that the ITRs would give licences for censorship.

Minor technical correction - X.25 was commonly used in parts of the early internet as a medium for transporting TCP/IP packets, and frame relay was a simplified X.25 that stuck around much longer. I last dealt with X.25 some time in the mid 2000s (though that was an apologetic "help, can you fix our antique or know anybody else who might?") During the 1980s and early 1990s, it was still the best way to do second-world and some third-world data communications, and the US government used it a lot internationally.

You could think of it as an alternative to switched Ethernet for wide area networks, and technology goes back and forth on when to use switching vs. routing. X.25 was a very heavyweight protocol, checking everything on every device that handled it, which made it slow and expensive, but it was mainly developed in the pre-modernization French telephone network that ran on leftover WW II barbed wire, so it wasn't an entirely bad design, in spite of all the insightful things Padlipsky said about it.

Sarah, Gary -- thanks for that comment! I'll take a closer look at the transcript, and chat to Declan about his take.

Bill -- you're right that TCP/IP ended up running over X.25 in some environments, but that's a little later in the story as I understand it. The standards battle was one of connectionless vs virtual circuits, with ARPA advocates and the CCITT taking opposite sides. Of course, both standards got made (that's what's so great about standards, there's so many of them), and X.25 did well in a number of domains. But TCP/IP undoubtedly won.

(I used an X.25 PAD as a teenager logging onto the first MUD, so I have some fond memories of it as network protocol.)